The Original Celeste Marie (Thebes, 1804-1970)

Recently Visited

Bookmarks

Explored: 1%

The Original Celeste Marie

(Thebes, 1804-1970)

My grandfather named the Celestes, my mothers, for his aunt Celeste Marie
Rowland, who was reputed to have had spiritual powers. Whether or not
that was true, she was a remarkable person: Celeste Marie was a founding
member of the Equal Franchise League of Catskill and also the Thebes chapter
of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, not a popular institution
in this remote Catholic town that lay alongside the bootleggers’
route from Canada to New York. She was the first woman in Thebes to drive
a car. She learned very late in life, and apparently she wasn’t
a good driver, but she liked to go fast. On muddy spring days her Studebaker
sedan could often be seen in local ditches, with Celeste Marie Rowland
sitting beside it, a puzzled but nonetheless broad smile on her face.
On her children’s birthdays she dressed up as a gypsy fortuneteller,
and bewitched the local youth with visions of an egalitarian, teetotaling
future peopled by tall, handsome strangers and fast cars. Maybe it was
in this capacity that she first impressed my grandfather. Cross my palm with silver… Whatever. He resolved to name
his first daughter after Celeste Marie, and when his first daughter turned
out to be twins, my grandfather, in the true stubborn Rowland fashion,
went ahead and gave both of them her name.

I don’t know if there’s
any power in names, or any truth, but the fact is that the Celestes inherited
something of their great-aunt’s spirit. They were unusually, almost
unnaturally willful, as my grandparents learned when they tried to put
their daughters in separate cribs, only to have Celeste (as they called
the older one; the younger one became Celeste Marie, or just Marie) climb
out of her own and, unable to get into her sister’s, fall asleep
at its feet. Night after night.

When they could talk the first thing the Celestes said was that they
wanted to be together; I wouldn’t be surprised if they spoke their
first word at the same moment, or if that word was sister. They
eschewed contact with other children. They had a secret doll city in the
attic, and they played secret doll games; they were noisy when they thought
they were alone, but fell silent when they heard anyone hearing them.
They were, in short, a world unto themselves, much as Celeste Marie had
been. And they liked to dress up! My grandfather showed me a picture of
my mothers wearing eyepatches that they’d made themselves, from
black velvet frocks my grandfather had bought them. That was the twins;
they took whatever you gave them and turned it into something else. Cross
my palm with silver… Secretly, I think, my grandfather hoped that
his twin daughters would tell him the future. Or rather, not the future,
but his future. Oliver wanted his daughters to see to the end of his story,
and to report that it was happy. He wanted them to put a laurel crown
on his head, and to make him the hero of their adoring memoirs. He couldn’t
have chosen two girls worse suited for the job. The Celestes turned out
pretty, smart, and talented, but they did not turn out generous, at least,
not towards their father. The only future they talked about was their
own.